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We’ve all heard about the idea that if someone is on the US “No Fly” list that they should be denied access to firearms. It’s been popularly called “No Fly, No Buy!” The core of this idea is that if you’re too dangerous to fly, you’re clearly too dangerous to own a gun. Extending the logic, if you can’t legally own a gun, you can’t kill people! By doing this, we’re making it safer and better for the American People. Ignoring the obviously glaring disregard for a politically inconvenient document called the United States Constitution, it seemed like it might work. I thought about this for a while, putting dangerous people on a list, and I decided that it could indeed work! Sure, we do have to ignore some pesky constitutional rights, create some new regulatory controls, and impose some administrative burdens on the people we’re trying to protect, but what is Congress for if not to keep us safe so we can do business?

It’s not as if there isn’t a precedent for this. A really old precedent too. Those that are steeped in US history may recall the incident in the Black Hills of Dakota where the Lakota People (also referred to as the Sioux Confederacy) were chased off their land so that the gold buried in those Black Hills could be mined. The Black Hills gold rush started in 1874 and went to a peak in 1877. Some people proffer evidence that the US Government created an incident and used it to enable the relocation of the Lakota to reservations and the taking over of their land, thereby enabled the mining of the buried gold by those seeking a better life. Some people believe this was all done for the betterment of the US economy and the safety and prosperity of the American People. Although it didn’t end well for General George Armstrong Custer, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, or the Lakota People, a bunch of people made a big-ass pile of money. In today’s dollars, estimates were over $150M a year for about 5 years.

So, leaping forward to the 21st century, we’re now talking about another threat to our economy: hackers, spies, and thieves. The worst case threat: if hackers continue to undermine our information protection technology, consumers will cease to use electronic payment or electronic information exchanges. It’s already costing us zillions of dollars a year to deal with the results of our inability to stop these financial and healthcare terrorists. Between the amount of money lost to theft and fraud and the amount of money we spend trying to prevent theft and fraud, it’s a big-ass pile of money. Add to that a total and complete collapse of our digital economy and it’s clear that we MUST TAKE ACTION!

So, what is the core of my “No Fly, No Browse” solution? It’s as simple as the “No Fly, No Buy” solution: you use a list! The No Fly list! It’s there, law enforcement is already watching it, so it makes sense to start there.

The US government “partners” with industry to add to the No Fly list those people that are suspected of being financial or healthcare terrorists! The finance industry can contribute names, the health care industry can contribute names and last but not least, the US government can contribute the names of suspected hackers, spies and thieves. When you go to buy a computer, you must submit your name for a background check. If you’re on the list, you can’t buy a computer! Voila! Information security problem SOLVED! The fact that they can no longer fly is just a lucky perk. Do you want to share a plane with a potential financial or healthcare terrorist? I sure don’t!

So, you say, what about the people that already have a computer? How do we stop them Mark? Great question! Again, a simple answer! To browse, you need an Internet connection! When you sign up for an Internet connection, the provider MUST CHECK THE LIST! If your name is on the “No Fly” list, you are denied an account! This is actually great because us security geeks LOVE belt and suspender solutions! This is double good since you get checked when you buy a computer AND you get checked when you buy an Internet account.

But, those of you intrepid and determined to find a loophole will point out “WAIT!! What if I can convince a friend to lend me a computer, or better yet, convince a friend to actually buy me a computer?” Great question. In the gun world, that’s called a “straw man purchase” and it’s AGAINST THE LAW! We simply make it illegal to buy a computer for someone that can’t pass a background check!

As you can see, each and every contingency has a solution. We just need to make sure that people understand that to ensure our security, we must give up a little bit of our constitutional protections. We must put our faith in administrative and regulatory solutions that ignore the actual problem while imposing higher costs and burdens on those that are most affected by the problem. History shows that only the Government can solve this problem for us. Only the Government has the track record that proves that increased administrative burden, regulatory control, and of course, the erosion of constitutional rights can solve our problems.

In a previous rant, I discussed how I thought we were a bit self diluting about our perceived success and “winning”. To sum up, and quite possibly piss off some security people, we’re not winning.

If we want to win, we need to change how we think!

Am I saying that we should declare war on hackers, spies and thieves? No. That’s fighting the same battle we’ve been fighting since the beginning. Declaring war on hackers, spies and thieves is aiming the gun at the wrong adversary. That would be like attacking a gang bar because your home got robbed instead of putting in cameras, an alarm and a safe. A bad plan with a very predictable outcome.

What I am saying is that we need to change our approach to one that is a bit more expansive in scope then the present “what is the vendor je jure for today” approach we’ve been executing for the last 35 freak’n years!

We need to start thinking that our data security solutions should be integrated in a way that predicts outcomes in a measurable way. I’m not talking about just making “metrics”, but producing secure outcomes in a meaningful way by basing them on sound engineering principles. What we need to do is start with a set of operating principles that govern how we make decisions during an engineering effort and how we execute against those decisions.

That means:

We have a documented set of operating principles

We have an agreed upon set of desired architectural behaviors

We have a policy foundation that is used to measure minimal compliance

We have a documented security architecture that is NOT vendor specific

We have a documented test and evaluation process

We have a rigid configuration management process

We have an enforced software assurance program

We have reliable telemetry systems that produce accurate data

We can consume our telemetry and use metrics to make management decisions

We have a documented set of operating principles

This would seem like a brain-dead assumption, but most groups run off to engineer something without the discipline of actually coming up with a plan. A documented set of operating principles enables the group to detect and manage scope-creep. This would mean ignoring the “threat de jure” and keeping your eye on the horizon. You may be considering a cloud architecture or an internal solution. You may have a hybrid. Whatever the decision, you should pick one and plan for it!

We have an agreed upon set of desired architectural behaviors.

So, what do we want our security architecture to do? Do we want it to detect? Do we want it to deter? Do we want it to prevent? Do we want something aggressive or passive? How fast do we want it to be? How sensitive do we want it to be? Keep in mind that NO security solution is perfect and we will always be dealing with hackers, spies and thieves. That means new threats. Do you want to be able to detect a change in how you react to those threats? In short, can you postulate how the system will react when placed under stress and can you verify that behavior?

We have a policy foundation that is used to measure minimal compliance.

Policy. Policy. Policy. Without it, we are but a piece of driftwood being driven at the will of the currents. Policy drives the foundation for all other decisions. Without policy, what the hell are you spending money on security for? Might as well spend the money on a boat trip for the entire company.! You need the policy to create that baseline of desired behaviors. For example, it is company policy not to give hackers, spies, and thieves access to the company jewels. Now, how do you execute against that?

We have a documented security architecture that is NOT vendor specific.

Sometimes it’s easier to cite a negative example then a positive one. One of the first questions I ask potential customers is “can you show me your security architecture?” In more times then I can recall, the immediate answer is either “McAfee” or “Symantec,” Ignore the fact that the answer is actually not addressing the question, the amount of signal in those answers is immense. And scary. If you can’t answer the first question, how can you even get to the follow on questions? Such as….How does this security technology integrate into the IT infrastructure? What are the various domains of protection? Where is the critical data and can you even draw a line around it? (Don’t get me started on that no-perimeter bull) If you’re using a cloud solution, how does it interface with your existing security tools, processes, and procedures? How well do those interfaces work?

We have a documented test and evaluation process.

I should also add >exercised< here. What this means is if you have spent the money to build a security solution, how do you know that it’s actually working as planned? Those annual evaluations? Right. Every single organization that has suffered a major attack can hold up a document that says they were either HIPAA-compliant or passed a PCI audit. Folks, THIS IS NOT TESTING THE SYSTEM! Penetration testing is also NOT TESTING THE SYSTEM!! Testing the system means injecting a signal into it and seeing how the system, including ALL of your security vendors, react to it from end-to-end. How long does this take? How sensitive is it? How long until you can detect the threat? How long until you can even notify the right people that you’re under attack? Most pen testing occurs under rigid controls and very highly contrived circumstances. All it does is meet a requirement to check a box. In many cases it intentionally doesn’t include the IRP!

We have a rigid configuration management process.

You wouldn’t just pop in a new core router or change a core software function in your product without some thought and planning, right? So why would you even consider making changes to your security systems without the same amount of forethought? Any kind of changes you make MUST be integrated into your environment, not just squirted in like RTV sealant into a crack in your bathtub.

We have an enforced software assurance program.

Most of you know what this means to your development teams, but how does it apply to your security software and hardware? Well….how about making sure that ALL of your security vendors have a software assurance (SA) program that they can articulate in the form of a policy or procedure? Trust begins with the tools you’re using, and if your vendors can’t demonstrate that they have a process that creates and maintains that trust, how can you trust their products? No software should be introduced into the architecture that does not pass the SA evaluation. Hope is NOT a good plan. The very first question I ask any vendor is “why should I trust your product?” The responses are at least entertaining!

We have reliable telemetry systems that produce accurate data.

The only way we can defend ourselves in this age of hyper-speeds is to automate. We knew this 15 years ago when we did the lessons learned after Code Red. (They were summarily ignored by the security industry) That means creating systems that can acquire data that we can use to make security decisions. I talked about this in my last book “Endpoint Security,” and after a few years of observation, I’ve come to believe that a process-control model is the only way forward. That means being able to get and classify telemetry quickly, reliably, and accurately. Your metrics cannot be “gameable” such that you can interpret them in a way that makes you look good. If a group of people look at your metrics, they should all reach the exact same conclusion every time regardless of the political situation. And, by the way, the number of patched systems isn’t a metric that’s high on my list of important security things to do. There is a reason for this….

We can consume our telemetry and use the metrics to make management decisions.

The last part of this is actually another brain-dead thing that seems to be ignored in the heat of battle. What good are the metrics if you can’t use them to make decisions? Granted, much of it is in support of the automated systems, but at a high level, you can use them to make budget decisions. For example, if your present vendor solution isn’t fast enough to detect and mitigate your test threats, perhaps it’s time to get a new vendor? By having objective data with which to make a decision, you make decisions that are good for your organization instead of good for your vendors.

I suspect that’s the bottom line here. By following these basic engineering principles, you can engineer solutions that meet your organization’s requirements, build in some innovation tolerance (or even, gasp, acceptance!) and provide some sorely needed budgetary predictability. That last part is pretty important to your CFO, your board, and your CEO. By having a plan and being able to show progress against it, you should be able to manage costs in a much more predictable way while protecting your corporate data and building a trustworthy data environment.

I remember sharing a cube with a guy that decided to write some software that he thought would identify when viruses made their way on to your computer. I remember looking forward to the clock speed increase to 5 MHz as a watershed event. I remember wondering what the hell I was going to do with 5MB of storage space on a hard disk drive and remember coining the phrase “on a clear disk you can seek forever”. I remember thinking that 5MB was huge. And I remember the BAUD speed debates with some folks saying that they could never break the 28.8K barrier. Those folks thought they had some sound engineering behind their claims. Thankfully, innovation and disruptive technology tend to ignore contemporary “sound engineering” principles.

And that’s where we find ourselves today – hampered by what our contemporaries consider “sound engineering” principles and what our industry has come to call “best practices”. So, “best practices” is defined in multiple ways by multiple sources but they all boil down to: “A method or technique that has consistently shown results superior to those achieved with other means, and that is used as a benchmark. See also best in class and leading practice.“

I kinda like that definition. It implies RESULTS! It implies SUCCESS! And I like success. What security person doesn’t? If you go to any security conference you will most likely hear or see either a speaker or vendor referring to best practices as the basis for their process definition and the source of their success.

Let’s look at the word “success” for a minute. Achieving a goal! We achieve we win. Through the mathematical principle of substitution we can do some quick grammatical math and say that winning is success! Right? We equate success with winning. Beating the opposition! Forging ahead! RESULTS!! And, with a minor leap using the exact same reasoning, we get to, wait for it…..PROGRESS!

Bullshit. Pure self-deluding bullshit.

How we can even define our “success” in the security field as progress is beyond me. We continue to have “surprises” and we continue to fight a battle that can best be described as strategic compromise. Each day we see new vendors hawking new technology in the hopes that their solution is “The One”. The one that changes everything.

So, what’s missing? Why, in a world where we can do such amazing things and have such amazing technology, has a solution to the problem of enterprise security eluded us for so long?

Well, I think the answer is actually quite simple: we’re too selfish.

We all want privacy, but we don’t want to give up anything to get it. What I mean here is similar to wanting to be safe on the airlines while you have a cheap ticket and don’t have to wait in TSA lines. You can get it good, you can get it fast, you can get it cheap. Pick any two. The problem is that the solution requires us to integrate systems that normally don’t integrate with one another. Our personal lives don’t usually touch law enforcement systems because we’re law-abiding citizens. Unfortunately, the system is set up to deal with those that would ignore the law in order to hurt us or to gain ground in their objectives. For them, the lawbreakers, it’s a lifestyle and a war. They don’t care about the law and count on the fact that our systems don’t talk, don’t share information, and aren’t integrated as an engineered system.

This is the first chapter in a story about how an APT can come to life in a real-world setting. This first chapter takes us through how a threat might evolve and how it might affect an ever increasing group of people. All the characters and locations are fictional….

Sargent McAfee was sure the crimes were linked but was still shaking his head at the sudden change in the perps behavior. The last 3 had been simple B and Es with the scum breaking a window or a sliding door to gain entry. Get in, steal the prescriptions, then get out. This was way different and way messier. Messier was an understatement. There was blood everywhere leading back to where poor Mrs. Goldsmith had first been bludgeoned. McAfee figured she made the mistake of getting up and that must have pissed the perp off quite a bit. Had it not been for the torn prescription bag in the kitchen he might never have had the hunch to link the crimes. Hell, as it was he still wasn’t sure. The CSI guys were on their way and it would soon be their problem.
“Hey sarge, got a woman here that says she’s with the L.A. Times, says she knows you.”
Crap, so much for a simple report. “Tell her I’ll be out in a minute and…” He didn’t get a chance to finish his sentence before the tall redhead burst into the room.
“OH MY FREAK’N GOD!” came spewing out of her mouth as she saw the way the room had been decorated with Mrs. Goldsmith’s bodily fluids. Deb Bradsmith had been a crime scene reporter for over 5 years but she still couldn’t get used to some of the things she’d seen. This ranked up there as far as she was concerned. A tiny little old lady lay in the middle of what could only be described as a blood bath. During the attack the perp must have hit an artery in the fragile Mrs Goldsmith and she bled out trying to reaching for her emergency button. She almost made it too. But, time to switch off the emotions and turn on the hard core investigative reporter. The observant, suspicious person that digs and digs and digs. The person that her boyfriend hates. The reporter that the cops dodge and block.
“Sweetheart, you know you can’t be here. I have to wrap things up for the CSI team. You have to go.” He said it and he believed it but he also knew he was going to have to have one of the other uniforms escort her out. He also know that being a sargent had about as much pull as being her boyfriend did. Zip. Yep, zip was at the high end of it too. She was here and it was too late. He knew she had completely memorized the entire room in the few seconds she’d been there.
“No need to tell me twice Rick, I’m outa here.” Deb was glad she ate lite at lunch.

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Gabriel generally didn’t care about how novatos dealt with their assignments but this new gig made him nervous. Some crappy little caja spits out an address and guys come back with Vicodin and oxycodone proving they’re worthy to join. After all, not everyone can be Mara Salvatrucha. Ya gotta prove yourself! Get’n free drugs was good, but this, this spooky infoshit, it bugged him. Guess it’s a new freak’n world. That’s what the geeks are tell’n him anyway. He liked it better when they just had to beat the crap out of some Blood to get cred. Something to be said for tradición. Where the hell were those two anyways? He threw the paper with the lists on the table with the empty beer bottles and thought they should’a been back hours ago.

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Something didn’t add up. Almost like clockwork, these break-ins happened once a week for the last month. Why hadn’t anyone noticed? “Hey Rick, don’t you think it’s weird that these things have been happening about once a week for the last month?” Deb posed the question to her cop boyfriend almost rhetorically.
“Probably takes that long for them to go through the drugs. No mystery there.” and he took another sip of his beer.
There had to be a link, she just wasn’t finding it. “So, we have four attacks in four different places. None of the victims knew each other and all of them were in some kind of severe pain.” They were dying she thought. Thanks to modern medicine, it was just taking longer. “Did you talk to the pharmacies that filled the prescriptions?” Maybe there was a link there.
“Ah…no. Why should we?” It had been a long day and now he was having to go through it again with her. “They were just the place that filled the bottles. Besides, they were all different. Some were CVS, some were Walgreens, and some were done at the hospital where they were seen. All the bottles had different pharmacy logos on them. Even the prescribing doc was different in each case.” The case was bothering him but he was tired and just wanted to rest. Tomorrow was another day.
She knew that trying to get the victims names was treading on a thin line, but maybe, just maybe, there was another thread she could pull on. It never hurt to ask…”do you have a list of the doctors that prescribed the meds?”
What was she thinking? The doctors names? OK, he’d bite. “Yepper, I do. Since you asked, it turns out each patient did ask if they needed to tell their doctor about the thefts. I told them that I wasn’t sure but to call them anyway just to be safe. One couple even had two doctors. One for each of them.” That was an memorable conversation. Some people are either married for way too long or just married to the wrong people. He seriously doubted that the husband had conspired with the woman’s doctor to kill her but you never know. He wondered if that’s what he thought about Deb. As a reporter she could be hard to live with but was she the right one? Maybe now, but in 30 years would she still be? “Here ya go” Maybe she would figure something out.

*************************
It was easy money. Each address was 50 bucks. A thirty day supply of vicodin could get $150. The math was easy. Dealing with his customers was not. Every time he dealt with them he felt like he had gotten out with his life. It’s odd how fate can be such a random influence on your life. Stop to help a damsel in distress, find out her boyfriend is MS13, they find out you’re a geek with a vision, they offer to finance that vision or kill you. Again, the math seemed kinda simple. And it more than pays the rent. Speaking of rent, it was time to see if his little money maker had spit out another list.

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She was looking right at it but she still couldn’t believe it. It just didn’t make sense. The link was pretty clear, but how? Why? The only conclusion she could come up with was that the doctors had no clue what was going on. Were they conspiring with someone to do this? If it was for drug diversion there were easier ways then prescribing them to a patient then breaking in and stealing them back.
But yet, there it was in front of her face. The only thing that linked the victims was that they all had been seen by doctors at the same hospital.
She didn’t have enough to go to print, but she knew that there was more. Probably a whole lot more. How many people had been broken into that hadn’t reported it to the police? The people that visited that hospital lived all over LA county. Hell, all over Southern California for that matter. She had found the link but how could she get more? Perhaps a discussion with the doctors might give her a clue.
*************************

“RICK!!! I got it!” She burst through the front door of his apartment like the hallway was on fire. She threw her oversized purse on the couch and didn’t even care that her Macbook had fallen out. This was clearly serious. She normally paid more attention to where her Macbook was then where her usually empty wallet was.
“You are so not going to believe what I’ve found out! I linked the doctors in your break-ins to the Healthy Forever hospital in downtown LA. I figured that I could interview them for a drug use story and see if I could learn anything.” She was in rapid fire mode now. He wondered how she breathed when she got like this. The talent did come in handy in certain situations though.
“What I learned was that all of them, and a few of their colleagues, had been re-writing prescriptions for lost or stolen meds more then usual for the last two months. Turns out it’s about 7 of them and when they compared notes it turns out it was about 25 patients over the last 8 weeks!”
If she was right, this was serious and it wasn’t a coincidence. They’d talked about it down at the precinct, figuring that it might be something planned. But 25 people in two months and a death was pretty significant. That meant they’d only gotten less then half the picture. Pretty crappy police work if he had to say.
But it made him think so he put on his cop hat and asked, “what about their normal rates of drug loss? You know, kids stealing their parents drugs for the party? What did they say about that?”
“Well, they do have a problem, but this was a pretty significant spike. Bad enough that they all got called by their internal compliance folks. They were pretty pissed about that too!”
She was sure that she was on to something here. Somehow these home invasions were linked to the increased prescriptions in some way, she just needed to ferret it out. But she did have some leverage – so far it was only one hospital in the area that she knew of….maybe she could use that to get another piece of the puzzle. Another visit to Healthy Forever she was thinking. Yep, she was good at pretending that she knew more then she really did. Hell, that’s what being an investigative reporter was about! By the time she was done she’d own this sucker!
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Stu Baker hated his job. He knew he was much more capable then what he was doing for this loony bin they called a hospital. Every time he turned around some doctor was preening his peacock feathers and telling him how to run his network. “Add my tablet to the network”, or “I need my email on my cell phone”. They were always pushing the limits and doing some stupid shit that he knew was going to cause problems with the freak’n security wonks at corporate. They had no clue what he was up against here. They just spit out stupid and useless policy directives that ate away at his precious time.
And now this. Some “genius” life giving doctor had forgotten his new toy in the consultation area. Well, not this time. No, he wasn’t going out of his way to help this time. From what he remembers, It’s been sitting there under the desk for the last 6 weeks and that’s where it can stay. If they won’t come to him and ask for his help, he wasn’t going to offer any up. Besides, he was sure he’d have some new stupid policy directive to comply with by the time he got back to his desk.
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The little geek in front of him was short, pudgy, unshaven, and he smelled. His long black hair was greasy and ready for its weekly washing. He didn’t mind someone being a bit ripe, hell, after wrenching on his ride for a day he could be quite the surprise to someone’s nose. He had to put his compañera in her place one day after she mentioned it in front of his amigos. But this, well, this was over the top. Get the list, give him the money, and send his smelly, greasy ass away. Besides, the guy was so nervous he was starting to make everyone edgy.
“Hey amigo, you got the list?” He was hoping the little geek wouldn’t talk because each time he opened his mouth the room would smell a little fouler. Like something died in his mouth and he tried to wash it out with coffee and cigarettes.
The greasy geek’s eyes darted to the door when Gabriel spoke but he managed to maintain his cool without peeing his pants. “yeah, I got it. You still up to giving me more money?”
Gabriel thought about it for a second. He thought he could get the list and not have to give him any money but he wasn’t sure that pissing off some cabrón that could have him declared dead in most of the worlds computers was a good thing. Then again, being legally dead could be interesting. “Si, here’s the dinero.” And with that Gabriel grabbed a paper bag with his left hand and tossed it at the geek. “Where’s the list?”
While the geek grabbed for the bag with one hand, his other hand fished around in the back pocket of his dirty jeans, pulled out an envelop. He couldn’t give it to Gabriel fast enough and he was on his way out the door. He could hear them laughing and he knew they were laughing at him but so what. He got what he wanted and they got what they wanted. In Rod’s book that was a “good deal”. Too bad these idiots didn’t use computers or he could handle this all over the web. It was better that way. No people.
Rod had work to do. He was very excited about an update to his software that would allow him to monitor more WiFi traffic with just a bit more overhead. Another week or so of work and he could push it out to his creation. He liked to push the updates in the early morning. Then he could get some sleep during the day and avoid the ugly people that filled the world.
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Two more weeks and four more invasions. At least nobody got hurt in the last four but that was probably due to luck and Deb knew it. Her cop boyfriend was starting to get real annoyed at her poking around and he’d even mentioned it one night in bed. Yeah, great foreplay talk “hey honey, stop poking around my crime scenes, let’s have sex”. Gees.
Today she was supposed to talk to some more doctors at Healthy Forever but they were late. That was OK with her because it gave her permission to poke around the hospital with a built in excuse, “Oh, sorry, I was looking for doctor Ledbetter, guess I shouldn’t be here” should work when she got caught were she shouldn’t be.
She had no idea she was about to stumble on the headline of the decade.
“I’m telling you Stu, that’s not one of our boxes! I have NO IDEA where that piece of shit came from. But I’m telling you it’s got a cell connection to it and it’s attached to our WiFi”
“Bullshit”. Stu wasn’t buying this load of crap. Just because he was a doctor he thought he could get away with anything. He ran some new security scanner and now this was his problem for some reason. “It’s not one of my boxes so it HAS to be one of YOURS! What ever it’s doing, it’s loading up the access points on this floor. It was fine until today. What ever update or what ever you guys did to it and it’s totally hosed the WiFi bandwidth and it’s annoying the pharmacy computers. I got complaints coming out my ass and it’s going to take me a week to catch up on my text messages.”
Deb knew Doctor John. He was the resident Chief Medical Information Officer for this region. He was pretty savvy but he was no expert. He’d download something, play with it, get folks excited about it, then move on to the next shinny thing he saw without any consideration for the crap he left in his wake. But something interesting was going on here. Both of these guys were so busy banging their dicks on the table that they were talking past each other. Clearly, here was a device that neither of them owned yet it was connected to the network and talking on a cellular link. That could only be bad bad bad. She couldn’t resist. It was like watching a car wreck on a foggy freeway. Yeah, you knew it was going to be bad, but there was nothing you could do about it. At least here she could poke the “drivers” a bit.
“Howyadoin Doc?” Doctor John turned around to see the vivid red head he had talked with a couple of weeks ago. “I’m annoyed. Stu here thinks that I’ve violated policy by placing this device on our network and I’m trying to tell him that I had nothing to do with it”
“And I’ve been trying to tell the Good Doctor here that his little toy has completely hosed the WiFi AND the pharmacy computers and now they can’t get a prescription filled from anywhere in the entire hospital” Stu had to cover his digital butt.
Then it clicked for Deb….
“How long has this box been here?” Stu thought about it for a minute, then grabbed his phone. He remembered he’d made a note about it. “About three months”
“When did it go bad?” Stu didn’t need to think about that one at all, “today at about 9am. Freaking thing has been flooding the pharmacy computers with address requests. It’s clogged the damn WiFi access points too. Everyone is pissed”
She was amazed that she saw it and they didn’t. But they haven’t been following the home invasions and they didn’t have a cop boyfriend. But she did. From her vantage point it was pretty simple and it was time to write the headline. Hopefully these two wouldn’t do too much damage to the box before she figured things out. She was sure she could find out who was behind this. All she had to do was work the situation right and she might have a chance. But she needed them to preserver the box.
But first, she needed to write that headline. “Murder tied to mystery box on Healthy Forever network”. She was sure she’d get a Pulitzer.

Part Two….
“You guys can’t stop the box!” She had to think fast else she’d loose the chance. “I’ve called the cops and they think this is tied to the murder of that little old lady a few weeks ago. That’s destroying evidence and you become an accessory to murder!” She was talking faster then she was thinking but it seemed to be doing the trick. Stu had stopped reaching for the box.
Stu was now officially shitting his pants.

Doctor Lydia Robles was confused to the point of immobilization. She kept going over the results again and again and all the data pointed to an outbreak. A serious outbreak. An outbreak that had the potential to become a pandemic. When she made the recommendation to relocate critical medical resources and supplement vaccine stockpiles in the New York first responders command centers she had no idea that DHS would stick their nose into it and decide to move the entire southwest vaccine stockpile to New York.

But someone did.

She didn’t think her work was important enough to attract the attention of any surveillance programs, but based on what she’d heard from the Snowden leak, she guessed that what got watched by the NSA didn’t have that high a bar to go over any more. Someone must have looked “over her shoulder” and decided that it was worse then she had initially thought. But still, someone should have talked to her. There was something not quite right about it. Something that a big data analysis couldn’t see but something that her human intuition told her was just a bit off.

With a precision that rivals an Army Ranger strike force, as soon as the trucks were unloaded in New York, the pathogen started to make itself felt in San Diego. The only correlating event that they could trace so far was that many of the people clogging the emergency rooms and morgues were at a Chargers game the day before. Estimates said that it would take 18 hours just to get the vaccine stockpile back to that part of the country and another 12 hours to get in a position to administer it. This meant that they were already 2 days behind a virus that made HPAIV look tame. That was translating into another problem: where to put the bodies.

This thing was spreading fast. As fast as the model said it was supposed to spread in New York. But the data in New York was clearly wrong. Someone had salted the New York data in order to make the CDC think there was a problem. This was intentional and it was an attack. But how and who? And even more curious, why?

Whoever they were, they had significant resources and the patience of Job. Linda wondered how many computers had been secretly hacked to create the thousands upon thousands of web accesses and tweets over the past few months that were required to influence her analysis.

One thing was sure; Big Data turned a corner this week. A very dangerous and deadly corner. When she crawled out of bed this morning she no idea that her passion for data analysis would be the cause of so much misery and death. Garbage in, garbage out was the old rule. Not any more! Now, garbage in, Big Garbage out! Linda knew that her job would never be the same again. Big Data as a weapon. Shit. She was going to have to figure out a way to add a pedigree to her data in the future.

That is, assuming there was a future and she still had a job in it after this was all over. Or worse, if she was even still alive by then.

So I ask you, what went wrong here? Sometimes failures aren’t technical in nature. Yes, the technology can seem to fail us, as it might have here. But even the best technology can’t save us from poor reasoning and sloppy processes. Sometimes the assumptions we make are at the root of the failure we’re trying to analyze. As was the case here, sometimes the very behavior of the underlying technology can be used as a delivery method. The tech was just a bit player here. Also consider that the very behavior of the people and the processes they employed were targeted in very subtle ways.

Although the subject of information security is a very serious one, sometimes we take ourselves a bit too seriously. When I wrote my first book and put it under a publisher’s nose, she said that she loved it! To quote her, “I love your writing style! It’s engaging, fun, and easy to follow. Too bad we wouldn’t be able to sell a single book.”

She was referring to the fact that I was aiming the book at the executive layer. My intent was to write a book that made security concepts easy for executives to place within the context of business requirements. I was trying to make it easier for them to understand what it was we were trying to do and why it was important so they could make better decisions.

I was also trying to make it easier for them to spot a “poser” so as to reduce the amount of bullshit that was flooding into our solution space. Instead of waiting for the next disaster, I was hoping I could get them ahead of the curve. Unfortunately, it seemed that Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy were a tad more popular then your garden-variety security geek.

So be it.

With that bit of advice tucked in a warm dark place, I wrote Endpoint Security. (A fantastic read by the way!) Alas, I’m still waiting for the groupies.

So, instead of droning on about solutions, vulnerabilities, risk, and how bad things are, I’m going to try a different path. I’m still going to ask hard questions, but I’m going to do it by telling some stories about how these things will affect our lives, and possibly our futures. I’m going to try to put myself in the place of the people that will be affected by our failures and try to tell their stories of how it impacted their lives and the people around them.

In short, I’m trying to get people to relate. We can build a better solution if everyone can see the possible future outcomes of not caring about it now.

So I give you our first story about how big data can go very very wrong.

Why would I take the time to sit in front of a computer at night when I sit in front of one all day?
Why would you write a book?
Why would you bicycle across the country?

Clearly not for the money and fame.

You do it because you believe it’s important and it should be done.

That’s why this blog.

Because I think we need to look at things in a different way. We need to ask some hard questions. We may not get immediate answers, but at least the question will be asked and hopefully, just hopefully, there is someone out there that is interested enough to ask the question of someone else. New thoughts, new approaches, new people, and most of all, an open, and (probably at times) caustic discussion. Not mean, not hurtful, but probing and unbiased. People are emotionally invested in the topics of information security and privacy because of the years of effort we’ve put into them.

And on both sides! Those of us that dedicate ourselves to protecting have a counterpart who’s just as dedicated to “freeing” the information. This discussion is as much about technology as it is about ideology. Yes, ideology. For example…

Should you make security obvious or invisible?
Does anyone have a right to any data?
Is risk the only way, or even a good way, to assess security?
Are we winning?
Can we even tell if we’re winning?

Hopefully, this blog and my expressed opinion will spark some discussion on these very subjects. We’re losing the battle right now and we need to figure out why before our industry turns into the punch line of some really bad jokes. And as a side benefit, maybe we can convince some people to do the right thing and use their skills for goodness and niceness instead of badness and evil.

When we don’t ask the hard questions we don’t reach beyond our limits. When we don’t ask questions at all, we enable those that have less then honorable intentions to do what they want without any accountability. It’s about time we start being honest about our abilities, our solutions, and our future.